The growing trend of mass customization in the manufacturing community has accentuated the importance of configuration systems. Configuration systems facilitate the configuration of desired products, services, or other assemblages that require users to gather and assimilate disparate knowledge of makes, models, types, features, options, limitations, manufacturing constraints, etc. of a desired product/service (or group of the same) to be configured. In the manufacturing sector, for example, a configuration system can reconcile the complexities involved with configuring customizable products that conform to certain known manufacturing constraints. Through the use of configuration systems, a user can identify any potential manufacturing problems prior to the expenditure of funds.
Typically, configuration is facilitated through interaction by a user, via a user interface, with an inference engine that performs, for example, frame-based inferences to discern product knowledge stored in a knowledge base. The creation of the knowledge base containing the disparate product knowledge involves acquiring the product knowledge from numerous sources and encoding that knowledge using graphical user interface (GUI) tools.
Such GUI tools allow the user (typically, a knowledge engineer) to model the product knowledge in a tree like structure where each node of the tree is known as a frame. The attributes that describe and specialize the frame are represented using slots. The node at each level in a tree inherits properties from its parent node(s) and allows the user to override, extend or specialize these properties at the current level. The level in a tree at which certain attributes are placed depends on the generality of those attributes. For example, attributes that are common to a number of configurable items are placed closer to the top of the tree. Attributes that specialize a configurable item are placed at the lower levels of the tree. This process of creating a frame based knowledge tree is called the product knowledge design process and is implemented by knowledge engineers.
Typically, the process of creating a frame based knowledge tree includes the creation of product information files by acquiring the product knowledge from various product experts. These experts can include pricing experts, manufacturing process experts, product specification experts, customer service experts, etc. The process of amassing the disparate product knowledge, organizing that knowledge in some predetermined hierarchical system, and creating a frame based knowledge tree is very time consuming, cost intensive and requires the coordination of several individuals.